It’s time to get out fabric!
It’s time to cut and sew!
It’s time to make some gift bags
For my presents –  Ho ho ho!

I look forward to this time of year. Yes, part of me dreads it, too, since there’s not enough time to do the things I want to do. And what is that, you ask? I want to make presents for all of the people I love. Do I have time to do that? More to the point, do you?

Okay, lean in. I’m going to tell you a secret. This is just for you, so don’t tell anyone else. I’m going to tell you the secret of how I find time to make gifts for everyone.

Ready? Here it is.

I buy gifts and then present them in handmade gift bags. Yup. It’s that simple. The bags are quick to make, can be made assembly-line style if you group the fabrics according to thread color, and you can use any fabric that suits you. And while I still think the gift is important, I find my family and friends are sometimes more excited about the gift bag. In fact, several family members hoard them in the fear that I will stop making them. I give them a gift bag filled with other gift bags so that they will actually use them. Plus a personal gift in, yes, a gift bag.

Why do I make my own gift bags?

• I have a lot of fabric.
• People love them.
• I don’t have time to make personalized gifts for everyone I care about, but I can give each person a little homemade love in a bag.
• I have a lot of fabric.
• It’s faster to wrap a gift in a bag than it is to use paper, tape, and a bow or ribbon.
• It’s a green alternative. No need to throw out piles of paper after the gift opening frenzy.
• I have a lot of fabric.
• The gift bags can (should!) be given away by the recipient to keep the love moving around.
• Or the gift bags can be kept and used in other ways.
• I have a lot of fabric.

And so I’ll steal time between writing projects and teaching and family stuff to play with my fabric and sew, sew, sew…guilt-free!

If you want to join my handmade gift bag movement, march yourself into your studio and start pulling fabric! Want more structure than that? You can order my gift bag pattern by clicking here or you can buy my pattern at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria, Virginia, on Saturday, December 3, 10am-5pm (I’ll be there until 4pm) during their annual Holiday Open House. I’ll be there, demonstrating Paintstik techniques and chatting about upcoming classes.

For pictures and more information about my gift bags, visit this previous blog post.

Power Suit Art Quilt Debut

Saturday, October 22, 2011 was a big day. We unveiled Power Suits: An Art Quilt Challenge at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria, Virginia, to a bustling space filled with artists, family members, friends, and newcomers to the art quilt world.

About the Exhibit

Power in Any Suit by Marilyn Owendoff

Quilts will remain on exhibit at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria, Virginia, through November 23, 2011. They are available for viewing during shop hours or by special appointment.

Viewers’ Choice

The Real Power Suits by Ellen Flaherty

The Viewers’ Choice Made Me Think Award went to Ellie Flaherty for her quilt The Real Power Suits. The quilt featured three nuns made in the image of her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. I love the play on words: The Real Higher Power Suit.

The Viewers’ Choice Hands-Down Favorite Award went to, well, me! I created a quilt called Power Suited Him from a portrait of my father. This image of my father has been a favorite of mine and I loved using it for our Power Suit Challenge logo. I tried to develop a different idea for my challenge quilt, but I kept coming back to my father’s picture. I’ll try to blog a little about process later. In response to requests for a class in this technique, I will offer a Studio Tech class in photo-inspired art quilts at Artistic Artifacts in the coming year.  

Power Suited Him by Cyndi Zacheis Souder

Exhibit Travel and the Power Suit CD
I’m thrilled to say that our quilts are scheduled to travel! We currently have two quilt shows on our calendar and we are looking for more opportunities to share these treasures with more quilters. If you are interested in showing our quilts, please contact me. We’d love to hear from you!

Look for Power Suit Quilts at these shows:

• March 14-17, 2012: Lancaster Spring Quilt Show at the Host Resort in Lancaster, PA
• January 24-27, 2013: Road to California in Ontario, California

We’ve created a Power Suit Quilts CD that includes the quilt images and artist’s statements. We’ve included two formats on the CD: a PowerPoint presentation that requires PowerPoint on your machine to view and a PDF that requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (a free download that comes loaded on most machines) to view. These will be available at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria, Virginia, at the Artistic Artifacts booth at the IQA Festival in Houston, TX November 3-6, 2011, and on the Artistic Artifacts website after the second week in November.

Next Challenge
While we had a captive audience, Judy and I announced our next challenge: Arts & Old Lace!

Unlike the Power Suit Challenge, we’ve limited the number of packets we’re distributing. After the feeding frenzy at the debut, we continued to receive calls for the packets. We’re taking whatever we have left to the IQA Festival in Houston, where I believe they will disappear in a flash. More about the next challenge in a future blog. For now, thanks for following our Power Suits Art Quilt Challenge. We’ve had an unbelievable amount of fun and we hope you have, too!

A little while ago, a friend of mine asked me to create a special necklace to celebrate a big day — his wife was scheduled to take the oath of U.S. citizenship. Today’s the big day for his wife and I thought I’d share the necklace I made to commemorate the occasion.

Close Up of the Pendant

The Pendant
We agreed that it would be nice to have a pendant or focal point for the necklace, and so he went looking for the perfect piece. We wanted to find something appropriate for the day that his wife could wear year round. He found it when a Google search landed him on Kellee Bostic’s webpage: http://artseekraftsee.artfire.com. This lovely piece has stars and stripes, but I think it’s subtle.

The pendant is made of PMC (precious metal clay) and is .999 silver. Very pure. And a perfect starting point for this necklace. My friends at Eminence Jewelers in Fairfax, VA engraved the date on the back.

FInished Necklace

Materials
The client wanted to evoke a patriotic spirit but we agreed that we didn’t want the piece to scream red, white, and blue. Once I had the pendant in hand, blue became the obvious choice. After a little searching, I found these lovely resin teardrop beads in a faded denim blue. I added blue seed beads and then began to play with the sterling components I have collected. The closure is a lovely moonstone and sterling box clasp from Star’s beads in Vienna, VA.

I wish my client and his wife all the best! Congratulations! It’s a big day.

The book my niece and my sister wrote (and my niece finished) is now available through Amazon. This memoir was a labor of love started by my niece and sister Vicki shortly after Vicki was diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer. When my sister could no longer contribute to the book, my niece continued the project, using Vicki’s e-mail messages to include her voice for as far into the story as possible.

Here’s the official Amazon description of the book:

Love you so much, a shared memoir is the story of Vicki and Karen, a mother and daughter writing in separate voices about the nearly five years in which they battle Vicki’s ovarian cancer, plan a wedding, struggle with infertility, experience the joy of pregnancy, navigate the first and last days of marriage, begin and retire from careers, move across continents, visit each other as often as possible, and decide to write a book about it all. Along their journey, they discovered that life doesn’t stop with a cancer diagnosis – sometimes it even accelerates, as theirs certainly did. More than thirty thousand women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year in North America and the UK alone. Any of them could have written about her cancer experience, and many have. What is unique about this book is that it is the shared story of a mother and daughter, each of them writing from her unique perspective about coping with cancer as life moves forward in unpredictable ways. This story is one of the lasting legacies of Vicki Greve, a woman who persevered through her battle against ovarian cancer with style and grace. It was written by women for women and their families, to which millions of women – and men – will relate. Proceeds will be donated in support of cancer research.

Characters in the Book

To properly launch the book, my niece hosted a party on Friday, August 19, which would have been my sister’s 66th birthday. The house and yard were filled with flowers and people, celebrating this achievement and supporting the cause of ovarian cancer awareness. I know that Vicki would have been so proud of her daughter; I certainly am.

Among the pictures included in the book are a few truly embarrassing shots of me and one happy group photo of some of the quilters who helped create Teal Beauty, a quilt made to raise money for cancer research at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK.

For more information about the book, visit http://www.OvarianCancerMemoir.com.

You can also like Ovarian Cancer Memoir on Facebook or follow it on Twitter.

To buy the book, visit Amazon.

If you are local to Northern Virginia, I have a box of books and I’m happy to save you the postage. Either comment on this blog post or e-mail me directly at Cyndi@MoonlightingQuilts.com.

Last, Vicki would want me to include the often overlooked symptoms of this silent cancer:

• Bloating
• Pelvic or abdominal pain
• Urinary urgency or frequency
• Difficulty eating or feeling full quickly

If you or someone you know has these symptoms almost daily for more than a few weeks, you should see your doctor, preferably a gynecologist. Please don’t wait, and don’t hesitate to be our own advocate if your doctor cannot satisfactorily diagnose or relieve your symptoms.

As a quilter, I spend my sewing time working on quilts and quilt-related projects. Yes, I learned to sew by making garments, but who has time to hem pants and replace buttons, much less learn machine embroidery? Me, apparently.

My Husband on his Bike

The Project
My husband loves to camp. Recently, when he realized a lifelong dream and purchased a motorcycle, he began looking at his camping gear in a new way. He began to attend BMW rallies with his brother, toting all of his gear on his bike. He traded his folding camp chair for a Kermit chair, well-known to motorcycle camping enthusiasts. He exchanged his camp towel (an old bath towel) for a new high-tech microfiber towel. Then came the request. “My chair and towel look like everyone else’s. Could you put my name on them for me?” I thought quickly. Sharpie pen? Fabric paint and a hand-cut stencil? Ahhh. I could use my 730e to machine embroider whatever he needed. I could use machine embroidery to help him farkle.

I learned some important things through this process and I want to share them along with a few project details.

The Design
After much discussion, we decided to embroider my husband’s first name. I wanted to use my monogram designs, and so I campaigned for three simple letters. However, many of the campers don’t know his last name; they just know him as Eric. And the font was important, of course. After much back-and-forth with e-mail, PDF font samples, and help from patient and generous friends, we settled on a design.

My 730e with Embroidered Microfiber Towel

Project Details
Font: The Bernina embroidery software I used allowed me to import True Type fonts. I went to ITCFonts.com and found the perfect fonts: ITC Rennie Mackintosh Std Bold and ITC Rennie Mackintosh Ornaments. Click, purchase, download. Check. By rotating and resizing, I was able to lay out the design exactly as we wanted it to look.

Stabilizer: I used a tear-away for both the chair back and the towel. The towel had no real loops, and so I did not need that clear topping to prevent the loops from being caught and the design from sinking too far down.

Embroidered Kermit Chair

The Back of the Design: I didn’t really care if the back of the name showed on the towel. Who would see it? I cared very much about the wrong side of the stitching showing on the back of the chair. My husband had the perfect solution. He had a patch he saved from one of the two coast-to-coast bicycle trips he made with Wandering Wheels. We both loved the irony of a bicycle patch on a chair used at motorcycle rallies. I sewed the patch on the back of the chair over the wrong side of the embroidery. Problem solved! You can see a faint line of stitching around the name on the chair.

This project took longer than I wanted it to, but I learned a lot about machine embroidery in the process. I loved using the technology I had on hand. I am mesmerized by the 730e as the embroidery module moves the hoop in perfect synchronization with the needle to form a perfect design. I must admit that I’m looking around the house for other things that need to be embroidered. I had fun. Maybe I’ll work on quilts next week.

Not long ago, I noticed a bird flying away from the red-berry wreath on our front porch. I was afraid she was trying to eat the berries, which are really styrofoam coated with red stuff, so my husband took down the wreath. That’s when we noticed the nest, filled with beautiful, fragile, light-blue eggs. We replaced the wreath with a sense of wonder.

Since we first noticed the nest, we’ve been watching the Mama Bird. She’s been sitting, waiting, watching, incubating.

This morning, I noticed that Mama Bird is gone. Camera in hand, I climbed onto the bench to check on the eggs. Gone. They’re all gone…but one.

This seems profound to me. There must be lessons here.

If our ideas — our creative offspring — are our eggs, then consider this.

1. Our ideas come from within. Our environment can add experiences, teach us skills, shift our perspective, but we ultimately produce our own ideas.
2. Once we have ideas, we must nurture them — put them in a safe place and attend to their needs. What do ideas need?
3. Not every idea will see the light of day. Some will be lost. And that’s okay. Sad, sure, but okay. We must spend our time and energy on the ideas that will make it out of the nest. Feed them and watch what they become.

I’m off to nurture some ideas of my own. Thanks, Mama Bird, for the inspiration.

If you have had difficulty ordering the challenge packet, you have options.

If you want to pick up your packet in person:

• Challenge packets are available from Artistic Artifacts at the IQA Festival in Cincinnati this week.
• If you’re local to Northern Virginia, you can pick up a packet at Artistic Artifacts in Alexandria.
• If you are in one of my classes, let me know before class and I’ll bring you a packet.

To order online:

• Challenge packets are now available on my website. I use the PayPal shopping cart, which also refuses to let me “sell” a packet for free. Your total cost is $5.00, which covers shipping by priority mail. In your cart, you’ll see the packet for one cent and the shipping for $4.99.
• Challenge packets are still available through Artistic Artifacts. If you are only getting the packet, then you will pay $5.oo for shipping. It looks like you are paying $5.00 for the packet, but that’s the shopping cart being persnickety. If the packet is part of an order, then Judy (the owner) will ship the packet for free with your order. The cart will look like you’re paying the $5.00. When Judy processes the order, she will refund the $5.00 to you.
• If you’d like to order through Artistic Artifacts and you want guidance, you can call the shop and Judy will walk you through the ordering process. She’s in Cincinnati for the week, but you can leave a message or wait until next week.
• If you want to order a packet and you’d rather not use a website, e-mail me at Cyndi@MoonlightingQuilts.com and I’ll give you a snailmail address so that you can mail me a check.

I’m really sorry about the ordering trouble. We just want to distribute Challenge Packets and have some fun with the Challenge. Let me know if there’s any way that I can help you.

Cyndi

A few months ago, I received a call from a local tailor asking if I would like his outdated fabric swatches. When I said yes, I had no idea how many swatches he had! Let’s just say it’s a good thing we had a truck when we went to pick them up.

Initially, I wanted to share these treasures with my art quilt students. Once I saw the boxes (and boxes and boxes), I knew this was bigger than my classes. And so I teamed up with Judy Gula of Artistic Artifacts to offer you this art quilt challenge.

Boxes of Swatch Books

Theme
What does “Power Suit” mean to you? Does it conjure images of smoke-filled rooms where deals are made? Is a Power Suit a garment or a person? Do you plug in a Power Suit? What if a Power Suit gave you Super Powers? Using Power Suits as your inspiration, create an art quilt that expresses your point of view.

Rules
1. Finished quilt size: 18” x 18”

2. The finished quilt must have a top, a middle, and a backing with some method of connecting the three layers.

3. The finished quilt must be labeled and have a hanging sleeve.

4. There may be no internal or external structure, rods, or hangers.

5. Just have fun.

Challenge Packet

Dates

August 31, 2011: Quilts are due. Ship to Artistic Artifacts, 4750 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304

Oct 22, 2011: Debut, Artistic Artifacts

Jan 2, 2012: Quilts shipped home

Questions
E-Mail: Cyndi@MoonlightingQuilts.com
Call: 703.407.0916

The Fine Print
You are responsible for providing your own insurance from the time the quilt leaves your hands to the time you get it back. We reserve the right to refuse quilts that we feel are inappropriate for the exhibition.

How to Participate
Ready to get started? Great!

You can get your challenge packet from Artistic Artifacts or directly from me (if you’re local). If you plan to pick up your packet at Artistic Artifacts, visit their website for hours. If you’d rather receive your materials in the mail, click here to order your packet from Artistic Artifacts. If you order the packet alone, then a $5 shipping charge will apply. If your order includes other items, then you pay shipping only for the other items and Artistic Artifacts will throw in the swatch packet for free. If you have trouble, you can also order the packet through my website.

Judy and I hope you will join us in the fun. Sign up now and get started!

Cyndi

I love pretty gifts. I appreciate the time it takes to wrap a beautiful gift. All my life, I’ve taken time to wrap pretty gifts, and I’ve gone through a lot of paper. I have nothing against wrapping paper, but it seems like a one trick pony. You buy it, use it once (or more if you’re really careful), and throw it away. Make one simple gift bag, and you’ll realize how quickly you can make a stash of bags large enough to wrap an entire year’s worth of gifts!

Ready to sew!

For years I’ve wrapped holiday gifts in fabric bags. I started small, using the bags only for special gifts and then I ramped up production and started to use the bags exclusively. What started as a whim has become a bit of an obsession, and I want to share that with you. There are lots of benefits to using fabric gift bags for your wrappings:

• Fabric gift bags are green. These gift bags can last for years, creating traditions among your family as the bags travel back and forth between households. There’s no waste beyond the gift tags and any tissue paper you may choose to use.
• Fabric gift bags can be really personal. When I shop for gift bag fabric, I watch for fabrics that will appeal to specific family and friends. Dinosaurs and trucks for my great-nephews, cardinals and snow-covered trees for my mother-in-law, anything less froofy for the men in my life.
• Fabric bags are the perfect canvas for trying out new things. You have lots of special stitches on your sewing machine; why not use them? Are you hoarding variegated thread? Use it up! They’ll make more!
  

  Pretty Bernina Stitches

• Fabric bags are convenient. My family has begun to build up their own gift bag supplies as they receive the bags each year. My niece, my mother-in-law, and my husband all commented this year about how easy it was to wrap gifts.
• The bags are great for travelers who can’t wrap gifts before they clear pre-flight security. Grab a stack of bags and wrap your gifts when you get to your destination. No paper to wrinkle, no shopping for tape or ribbon.  

Making Miles of Drawstring

The pattern’s a great stashbuster, as you begin to pick through your fabric collection with a new perspective. You know that fabric that you don’t want to cut up because it’s too pretty? Make a bag. Only have a fat quarter? Make a bag. Have over a yard? Make a BIG bag! And don’t forget you can sew your own drawstrings! I use my Bernina binding attachment to fold and sew it closed. Yes, I make miles and miles of the stuff!

I still make a nice supply of simple cotton bags for my gifts every year, but now I’ve started making a few special bags with some very special materials.

Treasures From Artistic Artifacts

Artistic Artifacts creates wonderful hand-dyed collage packs and I have fallen in love with them. I choose a color, pick a collage pack, and then augment the contents with vintage linens, doilies, and trim that Judy Gula (Artistic Artifacts owner) has lovingly collected and then hand-dyed.

2 Doilies, Fabric, Rickrack & Lace, All Hand-dyed

One more thing: don’t keep the bags to yourself. I tried that in the beginning, but it felt selfish. The bags are part of the gift. Give them away and encourage the recipients to do the same. I put labels inside my bags for everyone to sign so that each bag has a record of who has used it. It’s that simple. Give away the bag, get a smile, and save some trees that would have become wrapping paper. Give a Little Gift Bag and help change the world, one gift bag at a time.

The pattern is available on my website: www.MoonlightingQuilts.com or click here to go directly to the Pattern Page. Send me pictures of your gift bags…Thanks!

Trees Quilt, pattern available

Recently, I was contacted through e-mail by a new art quilter. She found my Trees pattern online and had a few questions. What started as a conversation about my pattern has morphed into a discussion about where to start when you are drawn to making art quilts. She tells me she loves to see nature represented in quilts and prefers organic art quilts to geometric patterns. She has sewing experience and she’s ready to dive into quilting. I thought this might resonate with others, and so I’m sharing my advice to her.

Her first question was how to begin, specifically, asking for beginner books. My response:

• First, subscribe to Quilting Arts Magazine. Seriously. I like it for inspiration, new techniques, and exposure to what’s going on in the quilt world. There’s no substitute.
• Next, look around to see what resonates with you. I can recommend books on specific techniques, but it’s best to narrow the field and figure out where to start. And so, what appeals to you? Collage, surface design, photorealism? Go into your local quilt shop (or, in the absence of a decent shop, go online and Google quilt books) and just look at the covers. If something pulls you in, then open it up and investigate.
• Generally, it’s a good idea to find books on basics that include a survey course on a variety of techniques. For the price of one book, you can cover a lot of territory. Get yourself a copy of The Painted Quilt by Linda and Laura Kemshall. You can find a link to it and more books I consider essential on this page of my website:  http://www.moonlightingquilts.com/FavoriteThings.htm.
• Most important is to find a group of like-minded individuals. Do you have a local quilt guild? Also, you are really, really lucky to be close-ish to Pacific Grove and Asilomar. Go online to  http://www.emptyspoolsseminars.com/. Attending this “quilt camp” is a life changing event for many quilters. Pricey, but worth it.

In a follow-up e-mail, my new friend told me she bought Joan Colvin’s Quilts from Nature, drawn in by the cover. With this in mind, I offered a book list:

• Nature’s Studio and The Nature of Design, both by Joan Colvin. If you like her style, continue to collect her books. I find her portraits haunting. The Nature of Design is a journal where Joan discusses her process.
• Personal Imagery in Art Quilts by Erika Carter. This artist has a completely different take on landscapes. Her trees are at the same time geometric and graceful. The book lays out her work in periods, which allows the reader to see a progression both in technique and palette.
• Serendipity Quilts: Cutting Loose Fabric Collage by Susan Carlson. While this book may prove inspirational, I’m recommending this book also for technique. Quilters who are discovering the world of art quilts are often stymied by the challenge of moving away from patterns and toward techniques. When I survey my incoming Art Quilts 101 students, I often hear about the desire to translate the visions in their heads into art quilts. This book provides an easy technique that takes the “how to” off the table and allows you to concentrate on design and composition.
• Luminous Landscapes by Gloria Loughman. Process, technique, and inspiration. Gorgeous work with a liberal dose of design and color theory.
• Intuitive Color & Design: Adventures in Art Quilting by Jean Wells. Some trees and landscapes, but mostly process and technique. Visually rich.
• A Fabric Journey: An Inside Look at the Quilts of Ruth B. McDowell by Ruth McDowell. Ruth does the most amazing pieced pictorial quilts. This book is about her process, which is straightforward and well-developed. If you decide you want to learn her technique, she has other books aimed at specific subject matter that you may enjoy. Her approach is worth investigating.

I’m eager for progress reports from this new quilter. I’m also eager for recommendations from you. What advice would you have for a new quilter? Or, if you are a new quilter, what questions do you have?